Cocoa Beach Cottage

Sweeney House, Book 1

By: Cecelia Scott

Narrated by: Vanessa Johansson

Samantha Parker is picking up the pieces of her life—and a pen to sign divorce papers—after she finds out her husband has been cheating on her and the other woman is expecting his child.

While the idea of leaving town and starting over is appealing, Sam's only option is to head back to her childhood home of Cocoa Beach, Florida, to help her recently widowed mother run their family inn. Can she go home and start her whole life over at forty-three?

Sam decides to spend the summer living in the beachfront cottage where she was raised, bringing her twenty-four-year-old daughter for moral support and laughter and her teenage son in the hopes that the change will help him heal too.

Finding peace on the sun-washed island, Sam finally spreads her wings, gets her first real job, and reconnects with the siblings she’s kept at a distance for far too many years. She helps her daughter navigate a new romance, guides her mother through a widow’s grief, and supports her sister as she faces an unexpected challenge. But when the pain of the divorce becomes too much for her fragile son to handle, Sam wonders if she can ever really escape her past.

©2022 Cecelia Scott (P)2023 Podium Audio

Great story

I loved this story ,was well written and the narrating was great. it was very heartwarming.

It is in an area where I grew up!

I loved this book and can’t wait to listen to the next book on the series. It has real family drama. I do want to point out that Winter Park does not have brick sidewalks. Park Avenue, the main drag going into downtown has brick streets.

The perseverance of each character.

I liked that each chapter centered on one person but yet blended in family members.

The Love of Family

The love of the family and their eagerness to take care of one another was so heartwarming. I can’t wait to listen to the other 5 books that proceed this one. GREAT READ & AUTHOR!!!

A realistic story

As always Debbie Macomber made me feel as if I was right there with the characters. ❤️

Love th book

just wish that the recording was better. The beginning of each chapter is missing the first few words of the beginning sentence. I feel like I'm missing out on the story

Narrator was great

The narrator was great. Clear character differentiation and development, true to the author’s words. Pleasant voice. Good pace.

The story’s characters held promise, but their self-centeredness and lack of child-to-parent boundaries were such weaknesses in the storytelling. They were so extreme as to either be unbelievable, or to make the characters unlikeable. The love they espoused for each other was belied by this egocentricity.

Samantha was the worst. Why she thought her mother’s house was still Samantha’s is beyond me. Samantha, a woman in her 40’s with a grown daughter and teenage son, behaved as an absolute adolescent when she learned her mom was thinking of selling the house. Her sister was equally self-centered as it related to work as well as to the house, with no ability to exhibit patience. Even the older brother, with a family of his own, was extraordinarily upset about the house. NONE of them had any empathy or compassion for their mom, who had been grieving the death of her spouse for nearly a year. While one might agree that it would have been kinder for Mom to discuss her thoughts with her offspring before making final decisions, she certainly didn’t owe it to them!

The author demonstrated the skill of character development; their various issues were sufficiently explored. So the author does have the ability to explore this selfishness. But she chose to use it, apparently, as a gimmick to create some drama.

But the biggest failures, in my mind, were the scenes related to the handling of the adoption. It was just much too unbelievable. Insufficient questions were asked of the potential parents. And they were totally blindsided in the end. Adoption agencies, legitimate ones, just don’t act like this. Parents are given educational opportunities to explore what can happen in adoptive families, particularly when one wants to adopt a baby but the agency has multiply-aged children to place. This whole scenario was so unbelievable that it seemed very much a “gotcha” gimmick and that is all. It is such an important theme to cover but there was no seriousness to it at all. If the author didn’t want to invest the time into it, she shouldn’t have even brought it into the story.

It’s too bad, as the author’s ability to tell a story was definitely exhibited. But the unbelievability ruined it all.